Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that's not what matters most. Every token in the orchestrator's context is competing for its attention, and the real value of a subagent is what it keeps out of that context. Subagents should be treated as a tool for protecting the orchestrator's working memory, offloading reasoning it doesn't need to hold onto. Doing this well means giving the orchestrator explicit ground ...

Originally published on Rails At Scale . We recently enabled a really cool feature in ZJIT that makes it feel like a Real Compiler™: the inliner! We’ll write more about it soon. In this post, we’ll talk about one excellent concrete benefit we are already seeing and how it optimizes blocks in pretty much every Ruby program. I’ll start off with a refresher on how blocks work in the Ruby interpreter, then show you how ZJIT understands and optimizes that bytecode, and then show you th...

0.0 Context Setting Monday, July 27 in Portland, Oregon. That’s it. That’s all the context I have for you. Oh, I guess it’s 4:50pm and I started writing this on something like Wednesday last week. 0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! How People Work, Live! is the live show about how to people. It’s based on my How People Work , my workshop that helps teams deliver better, faster, which itself is built on my last 20 years of working in tech. Each show I’m joined by a very specia...

Introduction In the Livelymerge project, Dan Ingalls, Peter Van Hardenberg, and I (Alex Warth) are building a Lively Kernel-like system whose heap — every object, class, and method — is an Automerge document. The pitch, from the first note in this series, was that this would give us merges “for free”: multiple users share the same object memory, work on it concurrently (even offline), and Automerge reconciles everything. I also wrote that merging the state of a live system is a non...

In a recent post I gave intuition for the sparse Cholesky elimination tree by appealing to the task DAG and showed how it could be compressed into a tree in the sparse case. That post also showed how to use and compute the tree. Here I take a narrower and more conventional route: I start from a naive symbolic translation of right-looking Cholesky, identify the structural work it repeats, and show how retaining only the first later row affected by each factor column naturally produces the elimi...

Laguna di Venezia by Anton Melbye, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at China’s EV subsidies, the future of aeroderivative gas turbines, a US-Saudi nuclear deal, defective roadway guardrails, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities The CEO of DR Horton, largest homebuilder in the US, th...

I'm running a programming contest I've spent the last few months working with friends to design the 29th annual ICFP programming contest. Designing a programming contest in a world with AI agents is tricky! I think we've made some interesting choices here. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/im-running-the-icfp-programming-contest I'm running a programming contest I've spent the last few months working with friends to design...

AKA "Spectrum has gone down two weeks in a row and I'm sick of it". I've been borrowing a portable 5G gateway from my Dad for a few weeks, for testing... and two weeks in a row, I've used it as a backup Internet option, since my Spectrum Business cable Internet has gone down. And yes, I'd get AT&T Fiber if I had the option, sadly they don't yet provide service at my studio. So I'm stuck with only one high speed wired provider. I may add on my own 5G backup Internet connection in the fut...

Always fun when your bike runs out of electricity on the way to work. Note to self: connect the trickle charger TONIGHT! (Wife is on the way with my jump box to save me) Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Always fun when your bike runs out of electricity on the way to work...

The twelfth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 12, I chat with Georgie , the author of Hey Georgie about, among other things, writing about travelling, blogging as a self-reflection tool, why someone should start a personal website today, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Georgie Hey Georgie The twelfth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders ...

Within every cow is a thriving ecosystem. Churning deep in its intestines, a massive fermentation chamber known as the rumen hosts a robust microbiome that can consume up to 100 pounds of feed daily. Inside this gut pouch, tens of millions of bacteria scavenge for scraps of fiber, starch, and other nutrients, and break down cellulose and proteins. They get a hand from microbial fungi… Source Within every cow is a thriving ecosystem. Churning deep in its intestines, a massive fermentation ch...

Chang’e 4 lander on the farside of the Moon, as imaged by the Yutu 2 rover. Image: CNSA China pioneered exploring our Moon’s mysterious farside with the Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 6 missions. Soil and rock samples fetched by Chang’e 6 changed our understanding of the Moon’s evolution , paving the way for future missions to seek answers to the next set of scientific questions about our Moon and its connection to Earth as well as events in the Solar System. Chang’e 4 and its ass...

Let's say there is a statement in math T that you wonder whether it's true or false.  You may even make a conjecture of which way it goes. Do you have a rooting interest?  I may think T is true, but if someone proves T or proves NOT(T) my main concerns are (1) can I understand the proof ? (2) is the proof interesting? Paul Erdos posed the sum-product conjecture which was recently proven false (by humans!).  I blogged about it  here . I wondered whether Paul Erdos would be happy with how it t...

This morning I finished reading Snow Country by Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata . The book was suggested to me by my cousin who, after our most recent dinner together where we talked at length about books, sent me a list of a dozen titles for me to read. When it comes to books that are suggested to me, I like to know as little as possible about them: I don’t research the author, I don’t read the blurb, I don’t seek reviews. I like to think that if someone suggested a book to me ther...

Codeberg recently changed its terms to exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Since I want GitHub to face competition I have thoughts. Codeberg is entirely within its rights to do this. It is an association with members and a democratic process, and that process produced a result. But democracy is a way of making a decision, not a guarantee that the decision is inclusive, wise, or even good for the people already depending on it. A majority can still decide that ...

Honeywell Aerospace is building trusted autonomy for both commercial and defense platforms leveraging Shield AI software development kit FARNBOROUGH, United Kingdom (July 22, 2026)   —  Honeywell Aerospace (Nasdaq: HONA) and Shield AI, a leader in AI-powered mission autonomy, today announced a Memorandum of Understanding under which Honeywell Aerospace will develop a trusted autonomy software stack on Shield AI’s Hivemind Software Development Kit, integrating Honeywell Aerospace’s...

I got some flattery delivered with my morning spam today: Hi RubenMy chargeback was approved, [sic] Mail merge! Can I get a mail merge for this gentleman, please? You are receiving this email because ${SPAMMER} solutions may be relevant to your role. This outreach is based on our legitimate interest in sharing relevant information with computation technology professionals. Computation technology professional has a nice ring to it. I don’t work in IT, I deliver exceptional co...

Go’s proposal to allow examples with any signature was accepted on July 8. Today, an example must look like func ExampleXxx() . go/doc skips the function as soon as it sees a parameter or result. The example doesn’t appear in go doc or on pkg.go.dev. The restriction comes from the two jobs an example can do: appear in documentation and run as a test. The test behavior starts when the function has a trailing // Output: comment. The generated test harness can call ExampleXxx() ...

Amodei in his latest blog post wrote a mix of agreeable things and things that I believe misrepresent where the real risk of AI is located. I want to focus my attention on why, among all the risks, open weight models constitute the mildest one. I write these words as a person who strongly believes AI may be very dangerous in the near future: 1. Exactly like what happened during the OpenAI / HF incident (which was a joke, but focus on the modalities, not the outcomes), the first serious AI inc...

Research report · Internet Archive holdings · 26 July 2026 Short answer: the memex itself was never built — not even a lab prototype. But Bush spent a decade building and funding its component machines, two of which were real, and one of which was delivered to the U.S. Navy. This report traces exactly how far each piece got, from sources in the Internet Archive’s own scanned collections. §1 What the memex was, and where it was only ever ink Bush described the memex publicly just o...

When your program asks for memory that is not in cache, the processor has to go to RAM. That trip costs on the order of 100 nanoseconds. On a 3 GHz core, that is about 300 cycles of doing nothing. Memory latency has not improved in ten years. The 2016 Broadwell answers a random access in 100 ns. The 2025 Turin, with DDR5-6400 and every advantage of a decade of progress, takes 140 ns. It got worse. The good news is that a modern core does not have to sit still. It can issue a second request b...

Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race t...

In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. Today, everyone can write sort-of-okay CSS by delegating the task to an LLM. LLMs make everybody into a generalist. Because of this, lots of people don’t think there’s any skill involved in working with LLMs. If you want the product that LLMs can deliver — PhD-level mathematics, pretty good...